Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • Assorted Updates

    It’s Tuesday.

    I spent a good deal of yesterday cleaning house, catching up on necessary but boring details, and talking to someone about photography.  Check this out.  Very nice work and Jennifer is very knowledgeable.  I put a permanent link to her site on the sidebar over there on the right.

    Digital.  It has changed more than the way we write, get news, or play.

    In the midst of all this, I may have neglected to report here that I am once more president on the Missouri Center for the Book.  I suspect there is a bit of masochism involved in this, although on whose part I’m not prepared to speculate.  Tomorrow I head back to the state capitol, Jefferson City, to participate in the Letters About Literature Awards.  This year is an especially good one for Missouri because…

    …we have a national winner in this year.  Imani Jackson, a 6th grader at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Jefferson City, was chosen as a National Honor Winner in Level I, for her letter to Maya Angelou about the poem Phenomenal Woman.  This is a big deal.  This program is now in all 50 states and often the number of letters tops a thousand in a given state, sometime going to two thousand or more.  Nationally, two Winners and four National Honor Winners are chosen at each level, in addition to the state awards. Imani will receive a $100 Target gift card and a $1,000 grant for the library of her choice as a prize.

    In the last couple of years some of the data coming out of studies concerning reading has been startling and encouraging.  Sharp rises, even among those demographics often seen as “troublesome.”  People in general are reading for pleasure more, and a lot of young people are.  One might jokingly quip about Twilight and Harry Potter being the main cause of the jump, but I don’t think so.  Those books may be “gateway” books.  The thing is, these levels are sustained.

    So I’m entering this last year of my participation in the Center with some optimism that the work we do, collectively, is having an effect.  (Yes, this is my last year—our by-laws require board members to leave after nine years, and for me that’s next spring.)  What I’m hoping to achieve this year is to get into place all the things I’d wanted to do last time.  Independent funding, the new website, maybe begin a new membership program, and solidly establish the annual Celebrations so they can grow into a state book fair.  We’ll see.

    It would be helpful if I could get a book sold in the meantime…

  • Institutional Abuse and its Discontents

    William Donahue is the head of the Catholic League in America.  Basically, he’s an apologist for all things Roman Catholic, and he comes across like an old line political boss from Chicago or the Lower East Side.  Loud, aggressive, with just enough facts to make him sound like a heavy-weight in more than just bluster.

    In the recent revelations about child abuse in European Catholic institutions and some allegations that the current Pope was responsible for some of it because he was in charge of the supervising organization at the time (which seems like a fairly straightforward argument to me), Donahue went on the attack and in one instance from the Fifties he blamed the parents for not going to the police.

    Everyone I have ever known who is not a Catholic has the same reaction—why didn’t the parents call the police?  Catholic reactions vary depending on age, but by and large this really misses the point.  All it says about these people who didn’t call the authorities is that they were truly devout Catholics, which is just what the Church wanted them to be.  They believed their priests.

    And let’s be honest, it took most of the Seventies for the whole issue of child sexual abuse to emerge from the shadows of “We don’t want to know about this” Ostrich behavior on the part of society in general and most of the Eighties to learn just how not innocent some children can be before this matter drew serious attention.  Prior to the Seventies people tended to think kids “made shit up” all the time and couldn’t be trusted to (a) tell the truth or (b) know what the truth is.  The myths about who does what and when still pervade the culture and the majority of folks (probably) still think pedophilia is the same as homosexuality.  So to assume that way back then people would run to the cops when a little kid said “Father so-and-so played with my wee-wee” is naive and a bit amnesiac.

    Add to that the strong hold Catholicism asserts on its adherents…

    A reasonable question is, what about non Catholic institutions?  A report here discusses the numbers for Protestant churches and the difficulties in collecting and collating the data.  The numbers actually place the incidents on par with claims made against the Catholic Church.  The numbers aren’t that different.

    What is different is the institutional reaction, and that’s where people like Donahue come in.  Protestant denominations do not have the same centralized organizational structure that the Catholic Church has.  When a local minister gets into trouble, or when a bishop finds himself in legal straits, it’s on him.  What makes the Catholic situation odious is the whole attitude the Church takes toward the obligations it expects from its adherents, the responsibilities entailed on the part of the priest, and the level of betrayal which ensues both when abuse is alleged (and demonstrated) and when the Church has moved to cover it up.

    Blaming the parents is a cheap shot.  They were being good Catholics and trusted their priest.  That’s what it meant to be a Catholic then.  I recall no such obligation of trust in my days as a Lutheran.  Sure, we expected we could trust our pastors, but he didn’t enjoy any special immunity if he did something he shouldn’t have done.

    It is not the numbers that are at issue in this.  It is the betrayal.  The nature of trust involved and the destruction of that trust.  Do I think these people were foolish to hold such opinions of their parish priests?  Maybe.  Do I understand it?  Sure.  That’s what they were taught.  The heinous nature of the betrayal only made the break harder to achieve and more painful to endure.

    Do I think institutions ought to expect, command, and hold such trust?  No.  That’s on the Church, though.  For fifteen centuries they’ve rejecting any kind of “eyes open” approach on the part of congregations.  Trust has always been expected to be absolute and blind.  Now they’re paying for it.

    It’s just too bad so many innocent people have to fork over the interest.

  • In Charge and At Large!

    Over this past weekend I had a couple of conversations with some people about the whole prom night controversy and one of the things that got said, which I’ve heard many times before in other contexts, was that, “don’t you think the people in authority know what they’re doing?”

    As if that is any answer when they demonstrate that, clearly, whatever they’re doing it has nothing to do with common sense, ethics, or any kind of honesty.

    I’ve  been hearing that rejoinder for decades, ever since Vietnam, and I keep coming back to that scene in All The President’s Men when Deep Throat lectures Robert Redford about the nature of the administration and he tells him, really, these are not very smart guys.  It was a revelatory moment for me, way back then, and ever since I have had a difficult time accepting any kind of authority Just Because.

    Because no, I don’t think many of these folks who are In Charge know very well what they’re doing.  They got these jobs on some kind of popularity contest basis and as long as nothing requiring a great deal of thought comes before them, it’s just administrative blank-filling.  But when they actually have to make a decision about something for which there is no line on the form…

    The school board—and maybe some of the parents as well—in Itawamba County, Mississippi, reacted from personal revulsion.  They looked at Constance McMillen and thought  “Oh, that’s not right!” and gave it no more thought, because, hey, who’d gainsay them?  The Students?  Big deal.

    But when Constance sued their asses, it changed to a “who the hell do you think you are?” affair and those In Charge, in a fit of pique, demonstrated even more clearly that, regardless of right or wrong, no  student was going to dictate to them, nosirree Bob, and most especially not some tuxedo-wearin’ dyke…I can picture the seething, redfaced rage at the presumption of that girl, tellin’ us we can’t bar anybody we damn please from the prom, like she has rights…

    They reverted to the school yard and turned it into a pissing contest.  Do I think they know what they’re doing?

    No, I don’t think such people are very smart or have good reasons for what they do and I think people who defend their actions on that assumptions themselves don’t give these matters much thought and would likely do as bad if not worse a job.  And that seems fairly consistent with what I see as a given in this country, that, when people get together in a large enough bunch, I.Q. is the first casualty.  No one wants to rock the boat, no one wants their sacred cows slaughtered, and no one wants to offend their neighbors.

    Is it any wonder things are a mess?

    Just askin’…

  • Prom Night, America

    Constance McMillen wanted to go to her high school prom.  Like most students in the United States, she doubtless saw the event as the capstone of four years of effort, a gala event for students that represents a reward for getting to the end of their senior year and, presumably, graduating not only from high school but into adulthood.  One night of glamor and revelry, dressed at a level of style and affluence many might never indulge again, to celebrate the matriculation into the next level of independence.  A party where students can show themselves—to their peers and to themselves—as adults.

    It has become something more, probably, than it was ever intended to be.  Patterned after high society “debuts” at which young ladies of good breeding (and potential wealth) are introduced to Society (with a capital “S”) in a manner that, when stripped of its finery and fashionable gloss, is really a very expensive dating service, with the idea of creating future matches between “suitable” couples, the high school prom is a showcase, a public demonstration of, presumably, the virtues of a graduating class.  Over the last few decades, even the less well-off schools strive to shine in what a prom achieves.  Instead of a local band in the high school gym, with bunting and streamers and colored lights to “hide” the fact that normally gym class and basketball are performed in this room, the prom has become elevated to a decent hotel with a ball room, a better-priced band (or a DJ), and all the attributes of a night on the town in Hollywood.  Tuxedos and gowns are de rigueur and students’ families spare no expense to deck their children out in clothes they really often can’t afford.  Limousines transport the budding fashionistas and their knights errant to the evening’s festivities and you know this cost a fortune.

    Students may be forgiven for believing that it’s for them.

    In its crudest terms, the prom is for the community, a self-congratulatory demonstration of how well the community believes it has done by its youth.  It is a statement about what that community would like to see itself as.  It is—still—a match game, from which future marriages may derive.  It is a staged exhibition of affirmation that the students have come out the end of twelve years of “schooling” the way the community wants them to.  It is, in short, less about the students, and mostly about the school and the community that pays for it.

    (Match game?  Certainly.  And in this, the students play the game.  Truth in advertising requires that I make a disclaimer here.  I did not attend my high school prom.  It was 1973, a time of volcanic social upheaval, and for years I used the excuse that I didn’t go because I didn’t want to participate in an antiquated, farcical, “establishment” exercise in peurile stagecraft.  The truth was, however, I didn’t go because I couldn’t get a date, and without a date, what’s the point?  Part of the shine of prom night is to demonstrate your suitability as a future spouse, your “eligibility”, and showing up solo would be a clear statement that you’re unwanted goods, rejected.  Why couldn’t I get a date?  Ultimately, I’ll never know, but after asking 86 girls and getting a consistent NO, I gave up.)

    So when someone—anyone—wants to attend the prom in a way that violates those community expectations, you may be assured there will be a negative reaction.

    The last time we saw this sort of reaction was—probably—when blacks and whites started going to the prom as couples.  (Especially a black male with a white female, and if the female was blonde, oh my the reaction increased, because there has always been something particularly provocative about the idea of black males touching white females in this country.  This has largely passed now in this country, but when I was a teenager it was guaranteed to cause a fight, certainly an uproar, and many a racist conversation over dinner.)  I personally recall an instance in which a couple of males with LONG HAIR were forbidden to attend the prom unless they got their hair cut to a “proper” length.

    Clothing is a big deal.  Jeans are probably frowned upon, certainly t-shirts.  Another instance I recall was a prom queen who showed up in a dress with a neckline that descended to her navel.  She was already there.  The guardians at the gate quickly assembled a bouquet of flowers three times the normal size and instructed her to hold it up to cover her skin, at least until all the photographs had been taken.

    So we now see a lesbian wishing to bring her date to the prom, dressed in a tuxedo.

    How many violations can we count!  Sexual orientation, dress code, and—probably the most innocent yet deadliest of them all—an expectation that the evening was for her.

    She sued.  The court said her rights had been violated.  She gets to attend.  What does the school do?  What, in effect, does the community do?

    Cancels the prom.

    Now everyone is angry at the lesbian.  It’s her fault.  She took their evening away.

    Really?  As I said, students can be forgiven for believing that prom night is for them.  Maybe it would be fairer to tell them when they’re freshmen that, in fact, no, prom night is not for you, it’s for US.  It’s to make US feel good, feel secure, feel justified, feel vindicated, validated, and reaffirmed that the vision we have for our kids and the community we wish to live in will not soon perish from the Earth.  How dare a single student presume to change the rules of the game and assume that this is somehow her night, as if, somehow, she had any rights at all?

    Because she is, still, a student.  She doesn’t have her diploma yet, only the promise of one, and until she has that piece of paper in hand, she’s a Child.  Prom night is only so she can get a taste of what it could be like to be an adult.

    The hypocrisy is profound.  All the accoutrements of the modern prom clearly—CLEARLY—reveal that among the other expectations students have for the night, many of them, is that at the end of the dancing and the lights and the pretty clothes and the fake debuts and the pretending at a class status most of them will never have they will get laid.  I say hypocrisy because no school official or community leader would ever admit that, yet they accede to the use of privately-leased limos and the holding of proms in hotels, exercising no control whatsoever on the after-hour activities.  Not, I hasten to add, that they could keep students from indulging themselves anyway, but by relinquishing their traditional roles of control of an ostensibly school activity they tacitly approve that activity on that night.  Which makes perfect sense, since, as I said, part of the ritual is matchmaking.

    How could they control it?  Simple.  Put the event back in the high school gym, forbid limousines, require parents to escort their kids to and from the prom.

    Oh, but the local business community would suffer!  All that money!

    Hypocrisy.

    And it gets pointed up by a young woman who wishes to show up as herself, flaunting the fact that her sexual proclivities run counter to the norm—because whatever the reality is between individuals about their relationships, to the public at large homosexuality is inevitably, inextricably tangled up with sex.  People can wink and squint and avert their gaze at what most 17 and 18 year-olds are doing and pretend that, really, maybe they’re not, but Constance McMillen put it right out there.  Showing up at the prom underlined so many of the realities of that night that it made people squirm.

    But rather than deny the hypocrisy, the school canceled the prom, thereby proving that prom night is about their expectations, not about the students.

    Now Constance has engaged on another suit, this one to force the school to hold the prom.  I hope she wins.  Because for four years, high school students are allowed to assume that prom night is their night, and to have it revealed in such a blatant and spineless way that, no, it’s not, requires an answer.  If you advertise something in a particular way, you should deliver.  As for Itawamba County, Mississippi?  Suck it up and live with it.

  • Buy Books Elsewhere

    IndieBound  is a website that helps connect people to independent bookstores.

    Why am I putting this link up?

    Because this nonsense between Amazon and MacMillan is the latest in a long history of corporate warfare that results in hurting writers more than it does in hurting the corporations involved, and despite what the Supreme Court said recently, corporations are not people.  Corporations are enormous digestive tracks that use people for nourishment.  They take them in, churn them up, dismantle their constituent parts, and shit out the excess they don’t use.  We really ought to get over the idea that corporations are good citizens.  They are not.  That many of them do beneficial things is not at issue—the fact is they are not designed to do beneficial things and if they do such things it is only because it is easier for them to function by so doing than otherwise.  The instant it becomes in their best interest to function maliciously, they do.

    Political screed done.  For the moment.

    This situation is directly impacting authors.  You can’t go buy certain books from Amazon because Amazon is having a control dispute with a major publisher.  John Scalzi has a very sensible recommendation at his site.  He is dead on, I think, about the idea of boycotting as a useful tool.  That just hurts authors more.  What needs to be done is for people to pay more attention about who they buy from and how that money funnels through the serpentine system to the people who need it.

    Go find an independent book dealer.  I mean it.  Get off you duffs and go to a bookstore.  You do two things that way—you support a local business and you keep money going, eventually, to a writer.  This is important for two reasons.

    The first is, the fewer independent book dealers there are, the more entities like Amazon can control our book buying choices, which eventually leads to their controlling the publishing scene in general.  We’ve already been through all the nonsense of superchains becoming so powerful that they can dictate what books publishers buy.  It hasn’t resulted in quite so dire a situation as the doomsayers predicted, but it’s been bad enough.  The publishing model in the last thirty years has changed so much that many previously supportable authors can no longer publish through national or global entities because the numbers mitigate against them.  You might feel that this is only natural, since if something doesn’t sell, maybe it ought to be left to dwindle away.  As far as it goes, this is true, but we haven’t been talking about work that doesn’t sell for a long time, we’ve been talking about work that doesn’t sell well enough, and the fact is the numbers are partly arbitrary and partly tied to leveraged debt.  If corporate stomachs hadn’t gone through a massive period of cannibalism and gobbled each other up in leveraged buy-outs, the debt burden of the resulting super stomachs would not be so high that previously moderately-selling authors could no longer get a slot in the next catalogue.  This situation is not helped by near-monopoly command of market-share by a small cadre of retailers.

    So go support a local bookstore.

    If you really don’t want to get out of the house and visit a brick-and-mortar store, many of them nevertheless have online sites and you can buy from them that way.  It may not be as cheap as Amazon, but paying a little extra can start to alleviate the situation where publishers can’t make enough from the retailer (Amazon) to keep many of those authors on their lists.

    On that aspect, go find some small press sites and buy books directly from them, bypassing the retailers entirely.  Small press is the future of independent publishing.  They need your help.  If you don’t want to do that, order small press publications through your local independent bookstore.

    Corporations are very efficient at making it easy for you to screw your longterm benefit by buying from them.  Mind you, when I say “Corporation” here, I’m not talking about a mom-and-pop shop that is doubtless incorporated, making them, legally, A Corporation.  I mean those entities that are large enough to be commonly known as corporations.  You all know who they are, I don’t have to list them.

    Start by going to IndieBound and setting up some accounts with some folks who know what a book is all about.  It may seem like a struggle over a just cause, this frakkus  between Amazon and MacMillan, but believe me, MacMillan isn’t getting pissy over ebook pricing because it wants to give the authors a little extra.  These are just two big dinosaurs ripping at each other, unconcerned about the scurrying little mammals trying not to get crushed in all the stomping.

    Oh, the second reason buying local is a good idea?  Getting out of the house occasionally is good for you.  Especially when it’s to buy something as important as a book from a real live flesh-and-blood human being.  It’ll keep you from being digested by a corporate stomach, at least in this instance.  And who knows?  You might decide to start doing all your buying locally.  And that can’t hurt.

  • Celebrity and Unread Books

    J.D. Salinger is dead.  Age 91, he died, according to reports, of natural causes, at home, away from the media.

    I confess—I never read him.  Catcher In The Rye is one of those touchstone books everyone had read, but not I.  For whatever reason, it never crossed my path.  I remember those bright red covers in high school, sort of wondered about it, but…

    We can’t read everything, and some books, if you don’t get to them at a certain period in your life, you might as well not bother.  I doubt Holden Caulfield’s adventures would mean to me now what they would have back then.  Besides, I have a lot of other stuff to read and I know I’ll never get to it all.

    Not long ago, the screenwriter Josh Olson (A History Of Violence) did an essay about the problem of time and professionalism.  I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script nails on the head certain issues all professionals face, that of giving time to those seeking validation, unwarranted assistance, or just some kind of reason to feel put upon.  I’ve been guilty myself of violating some of these strictures—wholly unknowing, naively—but, once I realized the mistake, never repeated it.  Some authors get downright strident about this issue and occasionally sound like screaming paranoid misanthropes when they finally come back at someone for not getting it.  See, it’s a no-win situation.  You take the piece and read it and it’s awful, you have a choice—tell the truth or lie.  Either one will get you into trouble and you end up looking like an ass.  But what if it’s good?  You still have a problem.  There is a lot of “good” work out there that will simply never find a publisher or producer.  It ain’t fair, it just is what it is.  There’s not enough room in the world for every piece of work.  So what do you do?  Recommend this person to your agent or publisher?  And what if it continues to be unsalable for any of a hundred reasons that have little or nothing to do with the work in hand?  You don’t run the universe, but if your acquaintance still can’t sell it, you look like either a moron or obviously someone who didn’t sincerely go to bat for the work.

    But in my case, this seldom comes up.  I’m one of those who doesn’t sell well most of the time.  It hurts, but there are reasons, and I’m not going to take advantage of people who have no stake in my career to either vent my frustration or climb over other people who may be just or more deserving.  (Maybe I’m a sap for doing that, but you have to live with yourself and shouldn’t do things that might make that difficult.)  But it does apply to reading in general—there just ain’t enough time for all the great books in the world.

    Salinger is not likely to be on my shelf anytime before my own demise.

    What I don’t get in people like Salinger is the recluse stuff.  I admit, to me it looks like a pose.  He’s never been out-of-print.  Nor has he ever had to write another novel.  I sometimes wonder if he engineered it so that he could just stop when he was on top.  Not a bad strategy, especially if you subsequently can’t finish another book.  But I admit, one of the reasons I’ve always done the work I’ve done has been a secret desire to be in the limelight.  Art of any kind has a bit of performance about it and artists who shun the stage always struck me as insincere.  I’m probably wrong about that and that’s okay.  I just don’t get it myself.

    But J.D. Salinger, who published his three volumes way back when and took the accolades to the bank ever since, who eschewed publicity and thereby generated mountains of it, has died, and has done so quite publicly even though he was at home, out of the limelight, with family and friends, apparently getting what he wanted.  Famous for rejecting fame.

    In the meantime, another writer, of considerable talent and certainly more productivity, is in the process of dying on the other side of the country, and except for the community of people who love her books will likely die largely ignored by the media and the public at large.  Kage Baker writes science fiction.  Her series of novels and stories of The Company are fine pieces, the first few exquisite disquisitions on history.  She writes fun yarns about characters who are both fully realized and compelling.  No, it’s doubtful any of them would ever become iconic in the way that Salinger’s relatively meager output has, but then I bet Kage’s, page for page, are a lot more fun.

    I’m not suggesting that there is any cosmic unfairness going on here.  The Universe doesn’t give a damn about fair.  The very idea is absurd.  I’m just saying that the perverse manner in which our attention gets manipulated often results in overlooking wonderful things.  Such is the case with my own indifference at age 15 or 16 when I should have read Catcher In The Rye, but instead…let me see, that was 1970 or 71, so I would have been reading Heinlein and Clarke, Bradbury and Zelazny, Henderson and Asimov.  (I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged about that time as well, not to mention a goodly dollop of Dickens, Hugo, Twain, and Hemingway.)  I had my sites set on what I thought were loftier planes of literary territory and this one just…slipped by.

    My point?  Only that it makes no sense to regret what you haven’t gotten to, especially if what you have discovered has enlivened your existence and widened your vistas.  If you haven’t read certain books because your were busy reading others, well, good for you.  The only sad thing would be is if you didn’t read certain books because you couldn’t make up your mind which and didn’t read any.  Or, worse, if you didn’t read any because you had no idea there was anything worth while inside them.

    But I would urge anyone reading this to go find a Kage Baker novel right now and indulge some wonder.

  • Quote For The Coming Times

    “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” Buddha

  • 2009…Assessment

    Annual reassessments are dicey things.  If you have a terrific year, they can sound like bragging, which would be nice for a change.  If you had an absolutely lousy year, they sound like whining, something I do enough of as it is.

    On the other hand, they can be autobiographical in instances where the possibility of anyone (including yourself) ever doing an “official” biography is next to nil.  In this instance, honesty is called for, the kind most people rarely indulge in public.  It gives one pause to consider the responsibility latent in such an enterprise.

    But, as they say, it’s my blog and I’ll bloody well write what I want.

    I don’t have many secrets.  A few, none so dire as to be prosecutable.  But I do have things I don’t wish to share generally.  One, I should get off my chest right now so everyone understands from whence I speak in what follows.  Ever since I was a kid, the one thing I wanted to be was famous.  You keep that secret for the most part for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s pretentious.  Two, if you fail, you look silly.  Three, if you don’t fail, it sort of comes across anyway, so there’s no point in declaring it.

    It’s not in itself a worthy goal.  We all know people who are famous for being famous—Paris Hilton comes to mind, although she did try to beef that up with some media choices that, well, anyway there’s Paris Hilton.  I think there were (and are, but at the moment I don’t know who they might be because I frankly don’t pay much attention anymore) people who got famous for something substantial and then continued being famous just because they were famous and never weren’t famous.  Truman Capote comes to mind, unfortunately.  I actually talked to people who had no idea he’d been a writer.  He was just that weird old guy with the hats and the high voice who snorted coke with other famous people at Studio 54.  This is not the sort of fame I wanted.  I wanted fame based on product, on work and effort, on stuff I made.  Photographs, paintings, music, but mainly writing.  I wanted, in fact, the work to be the famous part, with me sort of attached by the fact that it was my work.

    In any event, I am not famous.  Not widely.  Known, yes, but not so well known that I can rely on it for anything more than an occasional tip of the hat, as it were, so to speak, you know what I mean.  I can’t take it to the bank, an issue that presses any artist unmercifully from time to time.  You can’t keep making art if you can’t eat, house yourself, pay bills, etc and so forth.  Do we do it for the money?  You bet your ass.  Do we do it because of the money? Not at all.  If that sounds like a paradox, it’s not.  Dr. Johnson said anyone who writes for anything other than money is a fool.  I choose to read that as the act of creating art of any kind has no rational basis, but that human beings are not at base rational creatures, so there is no insult or derogation in being a fool for art.

    But to do it publicly and not get paid…well, one should not carry one’s foolishness to the point of starvation.  Dr. Johnson may have considered himself a noble fool as far as that goes.

    I have not secured a new book deal.

    I have written book reviews, thus far for two venues—my hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and an online mag called the Internet Review of Science Fiction.  The latter is becoming more reliable than the former.  The Post-Dispatch book section continues to shrink and aside from an essay requested of me this October past they’ve more or less stopped running my columns—which means I don’t get paid.  I had a couple month hiccup with IROSF, but they’ve just taken a new review so I hope to be back on track with them on a regular basis.  I need to find a few more paying review venues.

    I have sold no short stories.  I wrote (and rewrote, at request) one novella, but that has not been taken yet.  Part of the problem here is that I’ve been in Novel Mode for the better part of nine years and I just can’t seem to find my way back into short story mode.  I have a handful of short pieces from Back Then that still haven’t sold—don’t have a clue what’s wrong with them, if anything, it may just be a matter of taste, and that’s what makes this game so difficult and unreliable.  You can’t do a damn thing about Other People’s Taste.  But I’d like to haul my brain back into short story space eventually, because at one time I think I was fairly good at it.  I’m disappointed that, after a few invitations several years ago, no one has asked me for a story, so maybe I wasn’t all that good.  New anthologies are appearing, but I learn about them after they’ve been filled, so…

    I am working on a contemporary murder mystery.  (Still doing the genre jumping thing—since 2005 I have written a new space opera, an alternate history, a historical murder mystery/thriller, and now a contemporary MM, looking for something that will, you know, Sell.)  First draft is done, first rewrite nearly complete (just identified a whole thread that needs major repair, requiring the possible dumping of at least one chapter).  In the hopper?  Well…another big fat space opera that’s maybe tow-thirds done.  The sequel to the alternate history, half completed.  Assorted other projects in sketch form.  Once I finish the current project, I intend to rebuild my office and continue noodling on the alternate history sequel until Something Happens.

    There was the possibility of my getting a contract position at a university mentoring undergraduates in putting together submittable novels.  A friend of mine was fairly confident I could get on.  That fell through.  For whatever reason, I didn’t make the cut.  It does solve a problem—the work load appeared to be large, so the time thing regarding my own work would have been a factor.  But that will be a factor if I end up having to get a day job again (which is looking more likely).

    So did anything good happen this year?

    Sure.  I achieved some personal goals.  I’m still going to a gym, lifting weights.  At age 55 I reached (for the second time) my goal of bench pressing 225 lbs.  It’s an arbitrary goal, yes, but it has represented a psychological barrier to me since I started working out, and I made it.  I go three times a week and do a very full workout and I feel enormously good about that.

    I’ve started reading Dickens again.  This is a big deal for me.  I’d read several Dickens novels as a teenager (a few before I entered high school) and had thoroughly burned out on him.  Too much, too soon, or whatever, but I spent decades loathing him—unjustly.  I decided to get over it.  So I acquired a set of the Everyman’s Library edition of all his novels and set about reading them.  It will be fun.

    As I said in an earlier post (somewhere) I stepped down as president of the Missouri Center for the Book last April.  I had actually achieved every goal I set for myself with that position.  A lot of it was serendipity and some of it may not even be permanent, but we have a vital organization again (for the time being) and we’re about to select our second state poet laureate.  I turned the reins over into good hands and we’re moving apace with the few necessary things left dangling when I stepped aside.  I’m proud of the work I did.

    A very personal, though not private, set of accomplishments sort of garnish the year.  I finished my first historical novel back in March and sent it to my agent.  A departure, sure, but I think I have a solid idea for it and for a potential series.  It was very tiring but I’m proud of the result.  After completing it I attended a conference at Washington University, a symposium on Germaine de Staël.  Germaine figures in Orleans, the alternate history that has now been sitting at a publisher for three years now waiting on a decision.  (It has sat at another house for two years and a third has had it going on a year.  I have likewise experienced a similar hold-up with the last full-blown SF novel I wrote.)  The conference provided me with a number of academic contacts I may use when I get around to the third novel in that trilogy, which will be set back in the 1800s and feature de Staël through most of it.

    I’ve also completed the first draft of the contemporary murder mystery.  I’ve been hacking away at it for the last month.  I hope to have a final draft ready for submission by February.  This is my first attempt to write and complete something completely contemporary, completely non SFnal, and so far it feels pretty good.  Given the molasses slow sales progress on my others, I feel the need to expand my horizons.  Who knows, at some point I may be writing Louis L’Amour westerns.

    I just learned that one of my book review venues is closing down in February.  The Internet Review of Science Fiction has been running my pieces for over a year now, except for the last two months, but I’ll have a new one in the January issue.  My hometown newspaper seems to have stopped taking my reviews, which were all fantastic fiction anyway, something many newspapers continue to have an odd, uncomfortable reaction to.  So I’m back to looking for another market or two for reviews.

    Occasionally, I feel like entropy is having its way with me.  This is a wholly personal, utterly subjective impression, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling.  But then I go to the gym and do what I do and walk out, sweaty and stressed, and can feel good about the fact that at 55 I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.  Perhaps this isn’t important in terms of all the rest of my goals, but it’s personally important to me.

    I’ve read some damn fine books this past year.  I just finished Iain M. Banks’ newest, Transition.  I enjoyed it immensely, but it is flawed in a way that none of his other novels have been.  He’s playing with superhero motifs and it feels like a cheat.  Ultimately, I’d have to say it’s a failure, but it is a fascinating exercise.

    China Mieville’s The City and the City is just plain impressive.

    Cyberbad Days by Ian McDonald is a short story collection set in his future India milieu, which comes from the novel River of Gods, which I have yet to read.  I’m way behind on some of my favorite writers and McDonald is at the top of my always-recommended list.  This collection is wonderful.  I also read Charlie Stross’s Saturn’s Children , which turns a number of classic SF motifs inside-out even while remaining true to its sources.

    I also read all three of the available volumes of Kay Kenyon’s new series from PYR, “The Rose and the Entire,” starting with Bright of the Sky.  A World Too Near and City Without End continue it and there will be a fourth volume this spring.  I was hugely impressed with the world-building.  She veers perilously close to a fantasy plot with destiny and fate and all that nonsense woven in, but never quite gets there, and in the near miss creates a compelling tale.  I’m looking forward to the last book.

    A smattering of other recommendations: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams, Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison, House of Windows by John Langan, Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Blindsight by Peter Watts, The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins…

    Those are the highlights.  The last reminds me that I’ve paid more than a little attention this past year to the Culture Wars over evolution.  Dawkins, Hitchens, and a handful of others (plus regular reading of P.Z. Meyer’s wonderful blog Pharyngula) serve to remind that the idiots and numbnuts are ever with us and sometimes they can seem so reasonable.  We find ourselves driven to continually defend territory already won, revisit arguments already made, and engage fools for the sake of those who have not yet committed to one side of the debate or the other.  If anything will destroy us it is the ambivalence, indifference, and inattention directed toward a firm grasp of the real and a commitment to the truth that allows for those who want neither truth nor freedom to argue persuasively that the future is one clothed in chains we should willingly don.  To stand pat and simply say repeatedly “You’re wrong” doesn’t work because that is the same tactic the deniers and scientific ostriches use.  But to make the argument work requires that the audience know a few things, and our current state of education in the United States often makes that seem a continually receding goal.

    I’m not sure I even want to get into the politics of the past year.  I am ever-so-grateful the Bush administration is gone and I am trying patiently to withhold judgment on Obama, understanding what a mess he has to deal with, but we have a Supreme Court that will be hearing cases this winter on whether the restraints we have placed on Big Money are constitutional and I fear that they will decide corporations really are the same as individuals.  In which case, as they used to say, Katy bar the door, the wolves will be out.  I am not sanguine.

    Somewhat more than a year ago, close friends of ours challenged us to Be Happier by a certain date in 2010.  I’m trying to decide if that will happen.  On the plus side, I am no longer working at a day job I came to loathe.  My health has improved as a result.  Donna’s hours at her job decreased, giving us more time together.  I have been writing steadily and I am quite pleased with the work.  We’ve managed to adjust to my lack of income and we’re physically comfortable.

    On the minus side?  I’m still waiting for a new book contract.  Without that, I don’t really know what will happen or how I will manage to be content much less happy.

    I was told categorically in a job interview that my lack of college makes me unhirable in any academic institution.  Not because I cannot do the work—the job in question which led to the conversation was one I could do practically without any preparation, in photography—but because they could not in good conscience market me to prospective students.  “How can we ask them to pay for a degree their instructor doesn’t have?”  Naturally, I think that is shortsighted and stupid—expertise ought to matter more—but we live in an age of markets and advertising and spin.  Most people I’ve spoken to over the course of the year are impressed by my credentials and abilities, they whistle in admiration, but they won’t hire me.  “What,” they seem to be saying, “would we do with a dancing bear?”

    So I’m exploring the possibilities of getting a degree.  There’s a way that it won’t take four years and a big loan.  In the meantime, though, I have little choice but to make my choice of careers work.  Do or die time.  Hence the murder mystery (and, possibly, the western).

    So it is, as usual, a mixed bag.  A toss up what will happen in 2010.  When I do this next December I hope to report huge successes and breakthroughs.  But I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens, it won’t be anything expected.

    Happy New Year.  Be safe.

  • More Doors

    (Robin Trower is jamming on the stereo as I write this.  Just sayin’.)

    I feel the urge to write something, but no one topic presents itself with sufficient weight to dominate a whole entry.  What to talk about, that is the question.  That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week.

    Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called “revenooers” (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks exercising their right to be separate.  So they assume.  Appalachia, the Ozarks, parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, Texas…a lot of pockets, populated by people who have, for many reasons, acquired a sense of identity apart from the mainstream, and who feel imposed upon if the gov’ment so much as notices their existence.  They’d have a point if they truly did maintain a separate existence, but they don’t, and hypocrisy is the least amenable vice to reason.  At one time it was bootlegging, today it’s drugs, either marijuana or meth.  They don’t seem to get it that if they contribute to the erosion of the public weal then they forfeit the “right” to be left alone.  I really believe they don’t understand this simple equation.

    But do I believe that poor man was killed over some disagreement over politic hegemony?  No.  He knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and asked the wrong question and some good ol’ boys killed him.  Scrawling “Fed” on his chest was probably an afterthought, and means about as much as had they written “Cop” or “Fag” or “Stranger.”  Whoever did it probably thought he was being cute.

    I would point to this and say that anyone who thinks America is free of its terrorists, its fundamentalist jihadists, its unreconstructed semi-literate hate-mongers, its pockets of intolerance where just walking down the street wearing the wrong clothes can get one hurt or killed, then a closer look is necessary.  Like such groups and people in foreign climes, the motivations for these folks are many and varied, from religion and political purity to money or sex or just bitter resentments.  The binding characteristic is that they hate—not with a red-hot, spikey, enraged hate, but with the harsher, tamped-ash, slow-burn deep hatred of constant gauging, you to them, ranking those who belong against those who don’t, an ever-present, seething, low-grade fever of hate that informs every single thought and action.  It’s not so much that something triggers it at the moment, causing an aberrant act of outrage as that they start from a coal-bed of resentment and rejection that they take as “normal.”  That makes them harder to understand for most people.  The default position for these folks is to despise you because you aren’t like them, and may the ‘verse help you if you have any education, erudition, any sense of a larger civic ecology, and grasp that reality is more than the pathetic network of familial connections that hoards sentiment and incubates the drowning phobias of in-group solidarity and guarantees a cyclic affirmation of hopelessness.

    From this, though, I would point out one thing that we tend to forget in America, in the West, that open-mindedness is always based on resources.  There must be enough, more than enough, to make people comfortable.  Apocalyptic fiction is frightening not so much because the physical world crumbles, but because everyone accepts in the absence of Enough that the small bits and pieces, an apple, a loaf of bread, a piece of sheeting to cover your from rain, a drink of water, is always sufficient reason to throw Plato on the fire and give up on solving problems.  People, it suggests, lose morality, even love, when they’re hungry and frightened enough.

    I have a house-full of books.  I just got a few more yesterday.  The pile of unread tomes grows, and it makes me feel rich.

    Many years ago, a cousin of mine had to live upstairs from us, with my grandparents, because his mother and father had moved to a county where this cousin did not meet the local school standards.  He would have entered their high school a grade behind instead of graduating that year.  So he lived upstairs and attended his alma mater so he could graduate.

    I ended up having to look out for him.  He was stupid.  Not in that he lacked intelligence, but he had no concept of how to apply it.  He reacted.  He did things without forethought.  He got in trouble.  Consequently, he got me into some trouble.  I was not stupid, so the degree of trouble for me was minimized, confined to the problem of what to do with this kid.  I quickly reached a point of wanting him out of the house.  Which meant that sometimes I did his homework.

    I hadn’t had much contact with my cousins for years.  There were many reasons for this I won’t go into, but basically they were strangers to me.  They were cousins.  Fine.  Big deal.  So what?  This is perhaps a blindspot with me, but frankly family as a concept doesn’t mean much to me.  I was raised to earn friendship, regardless, and I expected it to be earned in turn.  The conditions are immaterial and vary wildly, but just laying a claim on one’s affections simply because you happen to be related is not an idea I subscribe to.

    So this kid was, while I “knew” him, pretty much a stranger.  One evening we’re conversing about this and that and we got onto the topic of sacrifice.  He proudly declared that he’d risk his life for me.

    “Why?” I asked.

    “You’re my cousin.  You’re family.”

    “So?”  He looked puzzled so I elaborated.  “Okay, say you find out that I’m a drug dealer.  The police get onto me and it looks like I might be arrested or killed by a rival.  You’d fight both for me because we’re family?”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’d stand between me and the police.”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’re an idiot,” I said.

    He looked hurt.  After a couple minutes, he asked,  “You wouldn’t do it for me?”

    “If you were a drug dealer and I found out, I’d turn your ass in.”

    “But I’m family!”

    “And if I’d never met you before?  You grew up on the east coast and you’ve just come here and looked me up for the first time.  We don’t know each other from Adam.”

    “We’d be family.”

    “That’s nuts.  You don’t know me.  I could be the worst person on the planet and you’re telling me you’d risk your life for me.  Would you do it for____?”  I named someone we both knew, unrelated.

    “No.”

    “What if he was the one who’d become the scientist who cured cancer?”

    He shrugged.  This was getting beyond his personal calculus.

    No, I don’t actually think consanguinity is sufficient reason to extend any more consideration than you would to a casual acquaintance, certainly not to someone who has become a close friend.  One of the reasons, I suppose, I have no children.  Blood is probably an evolutionary trait to guarantee the success of a given DNA, but in society it is often turned to abuse, an excuse to overlook all sorts of shortfalls.  I might have felt different had I had brothers and sisters, but I hope not.

    I recently read a novel called Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  It’s a harsh, unpleasant story of Ozark backwoods familial tyranny.  I understand it’s about to be released as a film.  It portrays the kind of chains family imposes under the most obscene kind of filial blackmail, the way it is used as an excuse to not only forgive but defend criminality, brutality, ignorance, and the perpetuation of a siege mentality that cannot afford to embrace anything genuinely moral.  It is at core an argument against a concept of family that holds sway over so much of the human race.

    But it also shows what I mean when I say all moral behavior rests on resource.  Having enough.  Having, perhaps, more than enough.  The irony, of course, is that the mindset that such entrenched poverty and the oppressive familial code that seems to emerge in its depths pretty much guarantees that those so trapped will never step outside to find a way to cure their condition.  Entropy.  Energy always ebbs in a closed system.  For growth you need outside energy.

    Sometimes the best way to help a situation is to leave it.  Perhaps what the world needs are more doors.  Open.  We have, perhaps, enough rooms.  We need more doors.

  • Legacies

    Comparisons of the disaster of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor break down in the aftermath.  What I remember is getting a phone call from my wife to turn on the news, any news, and then seeing the images on CNN.  I then called several people, including some on the west coast, early as it was.

    It was a binding experience.

    Then the silence of the skies for next few days.  All planes grounded.  We don’t pay attention to all that background noise until it disappears.

    And I remember wanting to strike back.

    But at who?

    I am not a reflex pacifist.  I do not believe in turning the other cheek as an automatic gesture.  The world, in aggregate, does not yield to such gestures until much blood is spent, and disgust comes to the aid of the peaceful intent.  Strike at me,  hurt my family and friends, threaten my home, I have no compunction about the use of violence.

    But not thoughtless lashing out, flailing, blind retaliation.  That does less good than the habitual use of peaceful surrender.  If we were to find these people, we needed to be smart about it, and move carefully.  When caught, punishment must be determined accordingly.

    That was not to be.  I watched our so-called leaders turn this event into a justification for major abuse globally.  The sympathy we had from the entire world evaporated as the United States began stomping around acting like a pissed off child whose lunch money had been taken by a bully.  But we were not small and weak, so embracing the automatic response of schoolyard tactics resulted in calamity.  I was horrified by the unfolding nightmare of the Bush years, all done supposedly in my name as a citizen.

    The aftermath of Pearl Harbor was horrible but not cause for self-loathing and shame.  We rose to an occasion that demanded sacrifice and we came to the aid of a  world gone mad.  The enemy was clear, the stakes enormous, the calculations easy enough.  Ugly as WWII was, our response was as close to noble as war can bestow, and we have carried ourselves with pride born out of that period for going on 70 years now.

    Not so after 9/11.

    We were struck in 1941 by a nation that officially declared war upon us.  We knew who they were, what they stood for, and where to find them.  It was a conflict of clear adversaries fighting as nations.

    The 9/11 aggressors were a band of people more like the mafia, with no nation, no formal declaration of war, and no clear face.  We had a few names, a few associations.  We didn’t know how to deal with this, so we pretended it was just like any other war, shoved the awkward details into the box called War, and attacked as if nations could be blamed.

    After WWII we could expect and received formal surrenders from nations authorized to sign such instruments.  Rebuilding began, and it could be argued that THAT was the real victory.

    Who will sign a surrender in this conflict?  Who can?  What would it look like?  And how do you rebuild something these very same enemies keep knocking down and by so doing make us knock them down as well, along with all the innocent people who just get in the way?

    There was a time hatred could not act on its own in such a vast theater—it required nations to enable it and give it reach.  That’s changed.

    It seems to me we need to start figuring out how to rid ourselves of hate.  We can’t do that if we keep hurting the very people we need to help.

    Our job has been made infinitely harder because of the schoolyard bully mentality of the administration that dragged us into this fray in the aftermath of national tragedy.  We may never regain the credibility needed to address the real issues.  That is the loss I continue to mourn on this day.

    The dead cannot be blamed for the acts of the living, and revenge is a cold legacy for the sacrifice of the honorable.